Cover of Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs

The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence can still be felt in any discussion of urban planning to this day.

Read more

'Eyes on the Street' is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates — all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets, while amassing the knowledge she would draw upon to write her most famous book, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'. Here, too, is the activist who helped lead an ultimately successful protest against Robert Moses's proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village; and who, in order to keep her sons out of the Vietnam War, moved to Canada, where she became as well known and admired as she was in the United States.

Audience
adult
Length
long · 512 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Oona Living in the Shadows: A Biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin Shares biography, nonfiction, memoir
  2. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Shares biography, nonfiction, history
  3. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn Shares biography, nonfiction, memoir
  4. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life Shares nonfiction, biography, memoir

“If you want more of the same (biography), start with these.”

  1. Serling: the Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man
  2. Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners
  3. Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
  4. American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

“If it was the memoir that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley
  2. Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth, a Life Beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen"
  3. Maria von Trapp: Beyond The Sound of Music
  4. The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City
  2. Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories
  3. Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life
  4. Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate